A couple of weeks ago we bought a Holux GPSport 260 Pro to replace an ageing Garmin Etrex. (due to lack of serial port, poor reception and poor battery life)

All the reviews/blurb suggested it can be used to navigate. However, we are struggling…has anyone got any pointers?

Selecting ‘Follow Course’ and then selecting a route plotted in Tracklogs, we have the choice of four options, one is ‘Track View’ where we get the route as a line, and a tiny arrow to show our position on the route. Using this function, you cannot view any other data such as speed, distance to next waypoint, next turn direction. Another option is Speed meter, this gives us a speed meter, and then on the subsequent two pages, navigation to the start of our route, and navigation to the destination. However, it appears to navigate in a straight line from the start to the destination, whereas we want it to navigate us to each turn.

On the Etrex we could split the page into say 6 or 8 fields, showing speed, distance count down to the next waypoint, distance off-course, and an arrow showing the next turn before we got there. I can’t see anyway to do this on the Holux. Even on the main Sport mode, you can only customise two of the 5 pages, and only get two fields on each.

I’ve got one of these and it is a bit of a pain to navigate with but it’s doable. I don’t use Tracklogs so i’m not sure how that works, i use memory map to plot a route. When you plot a route you need to put a waypoint at every significant change in the direction, that way when you use trackview it will direct you to to the following waypoint and not just the end. The trackview view also allows you to change the scale of the map so i zoom it in and find it to be pretty accurate, enough to navigate with anyway.
If you use the speed meter view you would still need to put in all of the waypoints as before but you would need to change the name of the waypoint to give you an idea of what to do when you get there, for example change the name to TR001 instead of WP001 which tells you that you need to turn right at that waypoint other wise you don’t know which way to go for a few seconds.

I hope that makes some kind of sense to you? I’m not at home at the minute so i can’t be more precise without it in front of me.

That does make sense, sounds a bit of a faff but workable. I will give it a go. Unfortunately we didn’t really play around with it for a week so we are outside the 14 days for returning it under distance selling regs.

I imagine it’d be the same on most gps devices? I’ve been fairly happy with mine, once i figured it out anyway. Any probs pm me and i’ll see if i can help.